


ink stains

by Babydoll Ria (Babydoll_Ria)



Series: Ficmas 2014 [4]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 09:28:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3114902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Babydoll_Ria/pseuds/Babydoll%20Ria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A person can't just go away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ink stains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sabaceanbabe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabaceanbabe/gifts).



She won’t see him, or anyone really.

The newest Victor of District Four has not been seen since her Tour and it garners whispers.

Some people just aren’t meant to be Victors, even ones as cunning as Annie Cresta.

She broke the dam, and drowned three tributes after her partner was beheaded and that girl, small, bony, with ripped clothes and twigs in her hair, looking broken and eternal like something dark, and terrifying that burns into his brain, everyone’s brain when they pulled her out.

Annie Cresta is terrifying and she’s gone unseen, which makes him more unnerved than her eyes that are sunken in and never focusing on the few times he’s seen her.

His father says she leaves in the morning and she comes back late at night. But the question is where is she?

Snow doesn’t care, he’s seen her as a lost cause, mad and insane. She broke, they say. Not worthy to be a Victor.

But a person can’t disappear, they can’t cave in and hide from the world.

It’s stupid, but it’s February and he needs to do something to keep his mind from going insane.

He needs to find Annie Cresta.

* * *

 

He’s a smart man, he’d like to think so. He’s no Cashmere who had them eating out of her slender hands, and he’s not like Annie who broke the Arena to get the advantage when there was six people left. But he is a smart man and the Victor’s Wharf is only so big, and there is only so many places she could go without being found that he’s going insane.

He’s tried to stay up and watch her leave but he blinks and he’s missed her-or she left from the back door.

So he leaves notes on the front door and on the back.

It just says _hi._

* * *

 

His notes get ignored.

He keeps sending them, because well he needs to do something and he can’t find her-he wonders if he was just hallucinating the seventy-first games because there’s a house but where the hell is Annie Cresta?

They stop being words, his notes. They become riddles, doodles, one time the answers to the cross word from the day before that he copied out for the laugh of it.

He tries writing in code, just to make things interesting.

* * *

 

It’s been about five months, and he writes notes more out of habit because there’s nothing to say because you can’t have a conversation with a wall, though he has tried.

He really succeeded in his argument to use against the handlers and escorts about why he should not wax his chest, with the notes.

It helped him get his sentence structure right.

* * *

 

He forgets on a Thursday because there was a large storm and he might have accidentally broken a window when he saw his reflection on the come down and he was more preoccupied on not having his house flood than to leave notes to a girl who exists but really doesn’t.

* * *

 

He wakes up on a Friday to a note on his door; its handwriting he doesn’t recognize, small and cramp and faint on the page, like the pen ran out of ink or whoever wrote it barely pressed down on the loose leaf paper.

It says _hi_.

* * *

 

The notes come after that, every day on scraps of paper, on personalized stationary from the Cresta Ship  LTD., on the back of receipts seven months old, on ticket stubs and post cards that they sell to the Capitol.

They make no sense.

There are run on sentences, arguments, what looks like a crossword, math equations, doodles of birds, and shells.

He wakes up to pub songs on old napkins and one week a five page letter that is a logical refutation about why waxing his chest is a good idea.

He laughs, when he realizes it; when it finally clicks that he’s getting seven months worth of replies seven months later, and when it ends right after Johanna Mason scared the ever loving fuck out of everyone, he gets one last note.

_Thank you_

* * *

 

No one’s ever thanked him before, so that note that’s crumpled in his fists and smells like vanilla and sea salt burns in his hands as he makes a place for himself on the stoop of her porch.

Mr. Cresta looks at him, confused when he comes home from work; but when he tells him that he’s waiting to talk to Annie he nods understandably and tells him she uses the back door.

He snorts, because he spent weeks watching the front door, not even thinking of the other exit to the house because it’s not an obvious idea.

But Annie Cresta has never been obvious.

He sits on the cement step, sunning himself until the sun sets and the moon shimmers out, hidden partly by the clouds.

It’s going to rain soon.

When it starts to rain, he sees Annie Cresta in a pale purple sun dress walking towards him.


End file.
